Comparative Negligence
by Obfuscatress
Summary: "Welcome back," Sebille Moran says eventually, when her tea is gone and Jim Moriarty is no closer to telling her why he's standing in her kitchen. "Let's try that once more with feeling."


Sebille Moran is a simple woman, this is what she has told herself all her life. She lives one day after another as though they are singular entities: following dreams, then justice, and finally money, until she finds herself holed into a one bedroom apartment with exhaustion draining from her bones at the thought of the days she used to believe in chasing valour. She stands over a white sink, scrubbing dried blood from under her fingernails and at least she can comfort herself with the thought that it is her own.

She's never been one for hands on combat - not in the army and not as a civilian - and for all the frankly perverse things she's done for Jim Moriarty, he has respected her request for distance admirably well. She suspects Moriarty has someone else to do that kind dirty of work, because he is hardly the sort to build executions around his assassin's comfort zone. And she, in turn, isn't the type to be personally offended, even for all the unspoken pride she takes in her lethal marksmanship.

Moran gives up on her hands, tiny triangles of crimson still slotted into the crevices between nail and skin. She splashes her face with water turned cold, pats herself dry, and stares at her own weary features in the mirror. The fluorescence of the bathroom light is truly unforgiving. There was a time when she used to be young, giving off the illusion of contentment though happiness was perhaps never the correct word to describe her flat eyes. Even those few redeeming shreds have melted away by now. She wonders if it was simply time that got her or if it is her constant proximity to death.

After all, she's killed a man not four hours ago and she feels nothing. No, not quite. She has visions of the static sound of sand brushing over sand in a mad desert tumble. She has visions of lying in the scorch of the sun with cramped up legs from hours upon hours of vigilant squinting at run down buildings. She has visions of London, sights lining up to draw a little cross over a government official before he crumples dead into his afternoon tea and shatters a delicate porcelain cup to soil his suit. Somewhere among her memories lies the sensation of a flicker of sympathy for a man named John Watson, because she recognised his particular brand of desperation even through the scope of her rifle. That was a trigger she hadn't pulled.

Today she had no such luck, not even a clean shot. Moran sighs with all the weight of her thirty-eight-year life comprised mostly of murder and tries to brush some stray spindles of hair into place. Tomorrow, she tells herself, there will be an influx of money in her bank account and she'll pay the rent. She flicks off the bathroom light and hobbles down the hall to the kitchen with the wound in her thigh searing mercilessly despite the generous amounts of lidocaine she'd doused it with earlier that night. At least she hadn't bled onto the roof they shot her on, because DNA evidence was a bitch to get rid of. Moran flicks on the next light switch, braced in the kitchen doorway for a moment's relief from the incessant pain.

"Occupational hazards are such a nuisance," Jim Moriarty drawls in his ever broadening brogue. She turns to see him standing in the corner by the stove, eyes boring into her with invasive inquisition.

"You would know all about it." Moran says, paying him no mind as she makes her way to the sink. She fills the kettle and pulls her favourite cup from the overhead cupboards, feeling his eyes on her, dissecting without permission, and she wonders whether he can tell she's surprised he's washed up on British soil already. She pours her water and deliberately doesn't offer him any, because this is not a comedy of manners, and quite frankly he has no business in her kitchen in the first place.

Moran finds a carton of milk in the fridge, sniffs it, and lets a little splash into her tea, wondering which one of them is going to start a verbal conversation first. In the end, it is her.

"So, what's brought the high and mighty to the lowly folk? I hear Sherlock Holmes has returned and I understand, generally speaking, the credibility of the Richard Brook charade died once and for all."

Moriarty's mouth curls with what she supposes is amusement, though it may just as well be a sadistic thought flickering across his mind. "Hardly a surprise. It did last for three long years, but since it is over: Why should Sherlock have all the fun to himself?"

"Then the Game is-"

"Yes, indeed," Moriarty cuts in, boredom slipping into his tone already. A new record, Moran notes. "I might need you, though I haven't fashioned up a plan quite yet. All I know is that Sherlock Holmes didn't hold up his end of the deal and that is not how I make business."

"Considering he wasn't the only one who cheated death, can he be blamed?"

"Well, resurrection isn't limited to biblical figures and Sherlock Holmes." He looks pleased with himself for the fraction of a moment before he slips back into his calculated self disguise and says, "But you should know all about it, having seen quite enough of death to tell when it's the real deal and when it's simply a graze encounter."

"In my experience people don't tend to shoot themselves in the head with graze encounters."

"That was a nice touch, wasn't it?" Moriarty asks with earnest glee and she thinks this is the sort of maniac her mother always told her to beware of. Too late now.

Moran shifts to lean against the kitchen counter at an angle to take weight off her injured leg. It occurs to her then that she is dressed in a t-shirt two sizes too big that swallows her torso only to reshape itself into something more solid at her hips. Further down old leggings that have gone fuzzy and too small in the wash, clinging to her thighs and riding up her calves to reveal a sliver of unshaven skin with a puckered scar defiling the bend over her right ankle paying testament to her years in the service. She muses it's a good thing the army destroyed any shred of self-consciousness she's managed to acquire in her lifetime before calloused hands and a death count stacking up in her favour.

Besides, Jim Moriarty hasn't hired her for aesthetic purposes. As a matter of fact she suspects his vanities lie elsewhere, because he seems neither bothered by being in a constant state of overdress and always on the short side. Even now, with a good two inches shaven off her normal height she remains taller than him. But it is his self-imposed compactness that unsettles her in the first place: the dead stare of his dark eyes made infinitely more menacing by the way he directs it upwards with a sense of purpose oozing from every ounce of his body. She imagines it would not be half as effective if directed from someone a foot taller, because looking down one's nose has a way of being easy and Moriarty is anything but. He tugs at the cuffs of his tailored suit that's worth more than the furniture in her living room

She sips at her tea and idly lets her mind sort through the memories of a night when she's peeled him out of his suit to find he was just as immaculately put together beneath it, save for a single scar like a frown on his knee. It is the sort that looked ancient - playground caliber - and somehow lent character to otherwise unmarked skin. In his case it had left her wondering if it hadn't been something completely mundane that had pushed him to thrust the world into complete chaos, drinking in the sight of his own arson with hedonistic pleasure, because a nine-year-old had once pushed him off the swing. The fact that it seems completely plausible should be reason for concern in itself, though Sebille Moran has always been one to throw caution to the wind without thought.

"Welcome back," she says eventually, when her tea is gone and Jim Moriarty is no closer to telling her why he's standing in her kitchen looking smug as hell. She sets her cup in the sink and considers asking him to leave and stick to texting, because she's tired of having her locks changed.

"Let's try that once more with feeling."

"Whom for?"

"Our dear Lord in the heavens," he supplies in a mocking sing song voice and she stops in passing, inches from his body with her head turning a mere fraction to meet the black of his eyes.

"Truly thrilling to see you among the living," Moran retorts and he snakes a hand around her wrist. She glances down at the grasp someone else might describe as shy, but she recognises to be effortless possession. "I am going to bed. I trust you to see yourself out."

And just like that she slips from his reach, instinctively trying to hide her limp as she retreats to her own quarters. That he should follow at a distance does not surprise her. They end up in her bare boned bedroom, her sitting on the edge of the bed and him just past the threshold in an all too casual violation of her space.

She throws back the covers and slips under impersonal grey sheets she's had for seven years, wrapping herself into a careless mess of down. Jim Moriarty doesn't budge an inch in the doorway and she defiantly turns her back to him and screws her eyes shut. She's slept in the presence of death itself and she'll be damned if she lets Moriarty bother her instead.

In the dark he does not exist, not until he steps up to the bed anyway, footsteps sounding against the floorboards like the incessant ticking of a clock. "What?" Moran grumbles in irritation, eyes still firmly shut. She's certain he's lurking right there at the edge of the bed with a self-satisfied smirk crawling onto his face.

She feels the corner of her blanket move ever so slightly, the quiet rustle of fabric as he makes a humming noise and mutters, "Thought so." She considers turning around to kick him, when a whisper of a breath brushes against the shell of her ear and he says, "You ought to buy better sheets. The thread count on these is blasphemous and I don't pay you heaps of money for such mediocrity."

Moran turns her head up and their faces are so close they share a breath from the sliver of air between them. "You pay me copious amounts of money to murder people. What I do with it is none of your concern, Jim Moriarty."

She swallows, the sound cutting through the quiet sounds of their dissonant breathing. Jim Moriarty is close enough to kiss without effort, a dip in favour of gravity on his part and she'd lose focus of the glint in his eyes at such a proximity, but she'll save that for another day.

"Unless you have any other arbitrary conclusions," she mutters with her own breath bouncing back from his skin, "I kindly urge you to fuck off."

He stays still for a moment and she can imagine a smile stretching out on his face even though she can barely make out his silhouette in the dark. He straightens out and there the footsteps are again, unabashedly noisy in the calm.

"Goodnight, Seb," Jim Moriarty chimes and her own voice echoes the sentiment in a sleepy slur.

"Goodnight, Jim."

In the end, Sebille Moran fancies herself nothing more than a simple woman with a complicated life and a strange employer. At least this is what she likes to tell herself, when she falls asleep to the lingering taste of tea in her mouth and the sound of the front door clicking shut.


End file.
